After a short leave I made my way to RAF Wellesbourne Mountford, the home at that time of the RAF School of Photography. I was to be a Photographer (Bulk Processing). I had been warned when I first enquired about being an RAF photographer that I was likely to spend my time processing aerial survey films rather than taking photographs, which turned out to be the case.

Wellesbourne Mountford was a small village a walkable distance from Stratford-on-Avon. The RAF station was on the outskirts of the village and had an airfield from which flew Avro Ansons on, I believe, navigation training flights. We had no contact with the flying side of the station. We were housed in a wooden hut just like the one at West Kirby, the living quarters being on the opposite side of the main road from the working site. The hut was in the charge of a Corporal, who lived in a room in one corner, but as long as we kept the hut reasonably tidy, he was happy. Only on one morning a week was the hut inspected, the evening before which was spent bulling it up to the required standard. There was one other airman there from my hut at West Kirby, Dick Chenery, and we were destined to stay more or less together during the rest of my RAF career.

Training, which took I believe 8 weeks, was divided into practical subjects and what was called Trade Science, which included optics and photographic chemistry. We learnt first to process pre-exposed glass plates in dishes, the first experience for many of us of working in a dark, wet, smelly environment. Over the weeks we progressed to processing rolls of aerial survey film, up to 9 inches wide, in tanks where it was wound from one spool to another and back again. This then had to be wound onto a slatted wooden drum for drying. And processing the same thing on huge machines which took the film in at one end and delivered it, dry and rolled up, at the other.

Sitting round the stove, swotting for exams. L-R Dick Chenery, Alan Sharpe, John Dodd, John Boon.

We learned to print from the negatives we processed, to process 16mm camera gun film, to take technical photographs (of equipment rather than people) and how to get out of potato picking.

The station had a farm, under the direction of a sergeant. Wednesday afternoon in the RAF is traditionally sports afternoon. Sport for non-sporting Aircraftsman trainees at Wellesbourne was, since it was autumn, potato picking. The sergeant drove a tractor to turn up the potatoes from the ground and the ACs followed, putting the potatoes in sacks. It was cold and muddy. There was a public golf course nearby, so one of my particular group obtained permission for us to play golf on sports afternoons.
Front row l-r John Boon, Dick Chenery, Alan Sharpe, John Dodd
Back right Jim Frape

Thereafter several of us strolled out of camp on Wednesday afternoons, armed with an old and solitary club, although we went nowhere near the golf club. Instead we walked into Stratford or got a bus to Leamington Spa. Not for any particular reason, we just wandered around and perhaps splashed out on a coffee. We had little money for anything else. We did go to see Othello in Stratford one evening, on a trip organised by the officer who taught Trade Science.

My trade became effective on 11 December 1956 and, together with several others, including Dick Chenery, John Dodd, Jim Frape and Alan Sharpe, I was posted to RAF Brampton, which was then in Huntingdonshire.